: For Students, Faculty, and Staff 
I’ve been waiting until everything was processed and on the shelves to make this announcement and now I finally can:
Beatrice Ojakangas
The Kirschner Cookbook Collection is now home to the cookbooks of Beatrice Ojakangas! Earlier this year, Ojakangas, a Duluth-based cookbook author donated her personal collection of nearly 2000 cookbooks to us. If you are a fan of Finnish or Scandinavian cooking, this collection is a must-see. You can browse all of the titles in this donation here. In addition to the time it took to catalog and process them, we also had to do quite a bit of rearranging in the library to make space for them. The Kirschner Collection has nearly doubled the space it takes now and it’s looking fantastic. We’re up to over 5600 items in the collection now, including this year’s James Beard Award winners which just arrived last week.
I’ll be taking time over the coming months to feature some of our new items. Here’s a peek at a few:
What a wonderful resource! I will definitely visit the collection.
I have a few thousand cookbooks & unlike generous Beatrice Ojakangas, I’m not ready to part with many yet, but I can’t imagine that my daughter will want all of them. I wonder if you could post a “wish-list,” how to donate & also what you don’t need, on your website. We cookbook-collectors all want our “finds” to be used. For example: an American regional cookbook from 1938 with Depression-era substitution notes & recipes for bear scrawled in fountain pen; “American-Hindi Cook Book” bilingual, 1952, by the American Women’s Club of New Delhi – some great recipes as well as a cultural document; American hippie cookbooks – bland & well-meaning in equal measure (diet for a dull planet!) but they do mark a pivotal moment in American cuisine. Someone should have these, splatters, notes & all.
Thank you so much for the donation offer! Our shelf space and processing capacity are limited, but we are interested in cookbooks that are rare, have some historical significance, and/or have a Minnesota connection. If you are interested in donating, you can send a list of titles to mkocher@umn.edu.